Digital solutions in children’s services: Key policy developments

“Across local area visits, social workers told us that clunky IT systems meant frequently entering duplicated information into mandatory fields and filling in word documents for information already on systems,” it states.

“In a social worker poll, 80% reported having their work disrupted on a fortnightly basis by poor case management systems, and three-quarters reported that they were not consulted before a new system was brought in.”

The report states that a key message from practitioners across England was for the review to recommend IT systems that enables them to see the information they need from partners “instantly”.

It adds: “There are different ways that the right technology can facilitate and automate information sharing and help practitioners make good decisions about the information they receive. It can give professionals a ‘single view’ of a child, pulling information from different systems.”

The review cites the Think Family Database in Bristol as an example of a local system that enables professionals to see a range of information about children to help make decisions.

It also highlights how technology systems can be used to notify social workers instantly about events in a child’s life that they need to be aware of – for example, when a child subject to a child protection plan attends A&E.

The review highlights several government trials to improve data and technology in children’s social care, but concludes they remain too localised in their focus when “what is needed is an ambitious collective objective to make progress on this issue nationally”.

It puts forward a series of recommendations including setting a national target to use technology to achieve frictionless sharing of information between public agencies and organisations to keep children safe by 2027.

“The aim should be that practitioners have quick and direct access to important information from partners and other local authorities, which is needed to help them understand a full picture of what is happening to a child and take action to keep them safe,” it adds.

Tech strategy gets a reboot

The government’s response to the Care Review – Stable Homes Built on Love – put forward plans to publish a data strategy by the end of 2023. The Department for Education published the Children’s Social Care Data and Digital Strategy last December which sets out the foundations for a long-term plan to use data and digital services to their full potential.

The department sets out short- and long-term actions across three key areas to deliver its strategic objectives.

1. Supporting strong data culture and leadership: The department has developed data sharing agreement templates and funded a local authority to develop and test solutions to overcome cultural and behavioural barriers to multi-agency information sharing. The long-term plan of the strategy is to make using data a core part of practice with children and families to improve insight and decision making. It will monitor and assess adoption of these practices so that the workforce receives the training support it needs to deliver this.

2. Supporting systems and technology: To ensure families’ and children’s needs are identified early, they will be better able to share their stories through technology, while improved case management systems will enable the capturing of this information more easily and reduce the need for parents and children to repeatedly retell their story. In the next two years, the DfE is testing how standards can be developed for use in children’s social care to make it easier to publish, access, share and use good quality data. It also plans to publish guidance on the responsible use of data analytics, work with local authorities to map the existing case management system market and evaluate and test different information sharing systems.

3. Improving the data collected, shared and used: The DfE wants to build understanding and confidence in the data it collects by regularly reviewing this to ensure it is appropriate and useful, create more valuable insights and share findings more effectively. It has developed measures to improve the children’s social care data dashboard and created a standard children’s social care dataset for councils to use. Long-term, the strategy sets out measures to improve the quality of data used by councils and safeguarding agencies to improve the early help response and enhance understanding of the extent of the role played by kinship carers. It also wants to work with Social Work England and the Information Commissioner to develop data sharing to improve understanding of social worker recruitment and retention issues.

The government is currently funding several projects to improve data and technology in this area including through the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), Data Accelerator Fund and Local Digital – but they remain focused on individual authorities and regions.

Budget focus on AI

A theme in March’s Budget is around using technology to drive efficiency in the public sector. A particular area the Treasury has identified is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and digitisation to reduce time spent on administration in public services. It promises a delivery plan will be developed for each area of the public sector that will “provide a clear vision for how public sector productivity can and will be improved”.

The Budget document states: “Cabinet Office will also set out how the Civil Service and wider public sector can take advantage of the opportunities of AI through a strategic vision, building on the establishment of the Incubator for AI. The Cabinet Office is also working with departments to finalise AI adoption plans, which will be ready in time for the Spending Review and will continue to expand the application of automation and AI across the range of priority areas.”

While much of the document focuses on measures to drive efficiency in the civil service, it also states that as part of a “whole-government approach” local authorities will be expected to produce plans by July 2024 setting out “how they will improve service performance, utilise data and technology and reduce wasteful spend”.

“DLUHC will also set up a productivity panel to support the long-term sustainability of the sector, which will discuss the key themes emerging from the plans and offer advice to both councils and government going forward,” the statement adds.

Local authorities and children’s services departments are still at the foothills of developing and adopting AI technology into their systems, although several trailblazer councils are working with system providers to test approaches. There is widespread recognition that AI could help reduce the administrative burden on practitioners and improve understanding of children’s needs leading to better and quicker decision making. However, the lack of standards governing the use of the technology and how data is used has led some experts to highlight the need for children’s services leaders to be cautious.

Local digital solutions

The absence until recently of a national technology strategy for children’s services has seen councils develop their own approaches to the use of digital solutions across a wide range of services for children and families.

In Norfolk, the county council has worked with tech company Cornerstone to develop a virtual reality (VR) programme that gives foster carers and adopters insight into the lived experiences of trauma, abuse and neglect through the eyes of the child. Over the past year, dozens of foster carers and adopters have used VR headsets with managers pointing to a reduction in placement breakdowns since its introduction.

South Tyneside Council has worked with Nebula Labs to digitise the records of foster children to create the Virtual Memory Box, a digital system that catalogues the images, written documents and audio or film clips that young people want to keep about their family and friends as well as their care journey.

North Yorkshire Council is piloting innovative technology to improve case management to support social workers in their safeguarding practice. Funded through the DfE’s Digital and Data Solutions Fund and supported by the Coram Innovation Incubator, the project is looking at how to map vulnerable children’s networks so that potential carers can be identified to prevent care placements (see practice example).

Meanwhile, some organisations are using digital systems to improve training for the children’s services workforce. Specialist trainer Activate Learning has been using VR to educate trainee early years practitioners about the signs of abuse in young children, while charity OnePlueOne has developed a suite of digital tools to train family support staff in local authorities in their work to tackle parental conflict (see training).

Whether through capturing data about needs, supporting frontline services or improving the skills of practitioners, digital systems are playing an increasingly important role in supporting children’s services to find the best solutions for vulnerable children and families.

Expert view: Digital solutions have huge potential now

Robin Denton, director of local government, Microsoft

Tech can play quite a major role in helping to improve the way that children’s services operates now. Generally, a lot of the case management systems that we see for children’s services require you to be at a keyboard to be able to populate them. That leads to a lot of inefficiency in the way that the sector operates because you have got people who are spending time writing up handwritten notes. They’re then having to enter that into the system, and in some cases, driving back to an office to do that. There is a lot of ways that you can drive efficiency there.

How do we change how you’re gathering notes with that young person, maybe just using voice [notes] to transcribe that interview with the family or young person, and automatically populate that into the case management tool.

Where you still need to be gathering text-based evidence, someone could dictate that into their mobile phone using the right technology and populate the form and take away a load of the rekeying.

We see a lot of opportunity for how you do schedule management, and what a school transport route needs to look like. And how do you maximize what that route planning looks like? Where are there local firms who have got safeguarding capabilities that you could match if it is going to be a taxi service, rather than the mini bus service?

Then there is the kind of back-office processes as well. We still see a lot of legacy software solutions where people are pulling out data to then change it in Excel. Or we’re still seeing a lot of rekeying where you’re literally taking the read out from one [computer system] and putting it into another one. We’ve got different bits of technology that will automate that.

That’s before we even get into the conversation around how to better leverage data and do some of the work that North Yorkshire Council are doing, where they’re building their knowledge around that vulnerable child. There’s so much you can do around prediction and early intervention.

Read CYP Now's Special Report on Digital Solutions in Children's Services here.

Further reading

Children’s Social Care Data and Digital Strategy, DfE, December 2023

Children’s Social Care National Framework and Dashboard consultation response, DfE

Stable Homes Built on Love, DfE, March 2023

Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, February 2022